1. Field
The present invention generally relates to techniques for charging a rechargeable battery. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for updating the full charge capacity of a rechargeable battery during a charging process for the battery.
2. Related Art
Rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are presently used to provide power in a wide variety of systems, including smartphones, wireless devices, laptop computers, cordless power tools and electric vehicles. The full charge capacity of a battery (often referred to as “Qmax”) is a measurement of the maximum chemical capacity of a rechargeable battery. As battery cells age, the full charge capacity of the battery generally decreases. Hence, measuring and updating the full charge capacity is fundamental to basic battery management, such as determining state-of-charge, reserve, use time and battery health.
To accurately estimate the full charge capacity of a battery after it has aged, existing techniques rely on an assumption that a user discharges the battery from a high state of charge to a low state of charge, with long rest periods at both endpoints of the discharging process, which allows two relaxed-voltage measurements to be taken at the two endpoints. Unfortunately, these existing techniques often fail to update the full charge capacity of a battery as a result of actual user behavior.
In reality, users typically leave their systems plugged in for a while after the systems have been fully charged, which allows an accurate relaxed measurement to be obtained at the full state of charge. However, it has been observed in the field that users do not typically allow rests at low states of charge. On the contrary, as soon as the battery discharges down to a low state of charge, the user typically plugs in the battery and charges it up again. Consequently, the battery does not rest and relax to the point where a measurement can be obtained at the low state of charge. This user behavior results in infrequent or even a complete absence of updates of the full charge capacity of a battery. This deficiency, in turn, can cause inaccurate reserve calculations and inaccurate gauging of a battery's state of charge which can lead to data loss from system brown-outs.
Note that problems that arise from the absence of updates to the full charge capacity can become worse for mobile phones because, even when the phones are not actively used, they are often configured to run applications in the background. As a result, some users almost never get full charge capacity updates because the batteries are not allowed to rest at the low states of charge. This means that over the lifetime of a mobile phone, while the capacity of the battery has become significantly smaller, the device might not be able to measure this accurately and will show an inaccurate state-of-charge to the user.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for accurately and reliably updating a full charge capacity of a battery without the above-described problems.